The plight of ‘Widows from AIDS’ in the Zambezi Valley 

In the midst of the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe, women cotton farmers are suffering under the impact of AIDS, project funding freezes, debt and poverty. Last year before the crisis began, Rexson Hodzi, AfFOResT’s* Field Officer, conducted interviews with two women farmers in the Zambezi Valley. Sam Page reports.

Teaching communal farmers about healthy living and living with HIV. Photo: Sam Page

Zimbabwe’s organic cotton production under threat
The crisis in Zimbabwe has led to the freezing of the organic cotton projects there, while women farmers keen to get involved are struggling to make ends meet in the conventional sector. Donors have frozen aid and workers are being intimidated. 

A tale of two farmers
Mrs Mhako
Mrs Mhako, widowed in 1999, has five children: two daughters, also widows (one is staying at home, the other living in Wedza); an unmarried daughter working as a maid for a local nurse; a 17 year old boy at school and a five year old girl, who appeared to be very sickly. Both children of the widowed daughters (aged five and six) are living with their grandmother.
    In December, Mrs Mhako and her daughter planted three acres of hybrid maize (Zea mays) using fertiliser, for her family’s food security. There was a drought in January and two out of the three acres of maize died. The women then planted another acre of maize, but this crop will not mature before the rains finish so is unlikely to yield anything. Their grain store was nearly empty and they intended to use the proceeds from their cotton crop to buy more mealie-meal feed within the next two months.
    At the beginning of the season, Mrs Mhako had no money so bought all the inputs for her cotton on credit from the Cotton Company of Zimbabwe. She purchased sufficient seed and pesticides – Rogor, Fenkill and Carbaryl – for 3.3 ha of cotton. These inputs cost Zimbabwe $12,000 (US$220). When Rexson met Mrs Mhako she was spraying her cotton with Fenkill (pyrethroid) using her husband’s back-pack sprayer. She was bare-foot and wearing only a dress and headscarf. She said she could not afford protective clothing and ‘anyway its too hot’. She normally sprays every Saturday but lately she has been doing it twice a week because of pest pressure. Rexson observed that the cotton was suffering from severe ‘boll-rot’ because of heavy rain that fell over the past two months. This means that the value of the harvest is likely to be less than the value of the inputs. As a result Mrs Mhako will be in debt to the Cotton Company. If she cannot settle this debt it will be recovered, with interest, by impounding her property.

Mrs Yotamu 
Mrs Yotamu who is 35 years old was also widowed in 1999. She has three children aged nine, four and two. She is growing 5.5 acres (2.3 ha) of conventional cotton and two acres (0.8 ha) of maize intercropped with pumpkin, sweet sorghum and sweet potato. She does all the labouring on the three ha by herself and is also paying for her eldest daughter to go to school by labouring on other people’s farms. She also had to take a loan for her cotton inputs but she did not know the value of this loan. 

The stalled promise of the organic cotton project 
When Rexson asked Mrs Mhako and her daughter if they had heard of the Organic Cotton Project, they said ‘Yes, but we have been neglected … It would help if you could come and show us how to grow cotton the organic way.’
    Mrs Yotamu had also heard of the Organic Cotton Project but did not know how to get involved. Rexson said that she seemed weak and was very thin and extremely depressed. She became upset when asked about food security and her children’s education and could not continue the conversation. Her youngest children tried to engage her in play but this just made her irritated.
    Considering the current food shortages in Zimbabwe, these families are likely to be amongst those who are now starving. Farmers were still interested in the project but many of them have now left because the organisational side has collapsed. 
    However, Mrs Emelda Wingwiri, who is a Farmer Field Worker and has been growing organic/zero-input cotton for the past five years is continuing to hold Farmer Field Schools (FFS) with 25 farmers: 24 women (many of them widows) and one man. She said the husband of one of the farmers is dying of AIDS so the other farmers in the group are giving her both emotional support and help with weeding and picking. 

Zimbabwe cotton outlook
Unfortunately neither of these farmers could be included in the Organic Cotton Project, even though the training that this project provided would have helped them eliminate all toxic pesticides from their farming system and increase food security, through the introduction of intercropping. This was because the main project donor decided to cut its funding on the grounds that the organic cotton production levels were too low even though, as individuals, many of the organic cotton farmers were able to obtain yields the same or higher than their conventional cotton. Since then many of the organic cotton farmers have been labelled as ‘subversive’ by ZANU PF and beaten and tortured. Now the election is over it remains to be seen how many farmers have been able to withstand this intimidation and whether any donor will be prepared to help re-build their project.

Dr Sam Page is a specialist in farmer-participatory development and mitigating the impact of HIV/AIDS amongst smallholder farmers. 

* African Farmers’ Organic Research and Training

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 56, June 2002, page 15]